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Book Cat Speaks! & Three Literary Links

Salve! (pronounced Sal-way!) That’s “Hi” in Latin.

Yup. I’m a Book Cat. I’ve picked up a LOT from reading over my bookish PERSON’S shoulder since I left the pound. I usually enjoy books, except when she’s crying over every other page of The Dollmaker. I did sit on the book for a while to discourage her from reading on. My colleague cats are so strung out by the emotional roller coaster of Appalchian fiction that one took a little bite out of the corner of a page. When will they learn? I REVERE books, even when they made me sad. If they allowed domestic shorthairs like me to compete at cat shows, I’d do tricks with books proving I’m way brainier than those Persians and Hairless Cats who win Best in Show! But I’m frankly too unsedated to sit in a cage and let the judges handle me. I’m more interested in feline classics than displaying my coat: my favorites books are Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita,The Dover Anthology of Cat Stories, Paul Gallico’s The Three Lives of Thomasina, and T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

I have a lot of book-related jobs.

Sitting on bookcases. I call it Keeping on Top of Books.

Sniffing library books. They do have the oddest smell.

Culling the Persephone collecton. I like Isobel English’a Every Eye, which I’m sitting on. Sorry, the other has to go.

And now I’m also picking out today’s literary links, because my person is colossally bored.

THREE LITERARY LINKS.

1 Sarah Boxer writes at the Atlanticabout reading Proust on a cellphone after her silver paperback fell apart and she experienced reader’s block.

A long time ago I was hopelessly hung up, and not in a good way, on a certain passage in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The offending passage, obstructing all the rest of Proust for me, lay in the very middle volume, the fourth of seven, which was then called Cities of the Plain (and has since been retranslated, with more accuracy and more filth, as Sodom and Gomorrah)

And she says she finally got past it and finished up on a cell phone. She claims it was a Proustian experience. I don’t buy it., but it’s amusing.

No body of writing has engendered more other bodies of writing than the Bible, but the Brontë corpus comes alarmingly close. “Since 1857, when Elizabeth Gaskell published her famous Life of Charlotte Brontë, hardly a year has gone by without some form of biographical material on the Brontës appearing—from articles in newspapers to full-length lives, from images on tea towels to plays, films, and novelizations,” wrote Lucasta Miller in The Brontë Myth, her 2001 history of Brontëmania. This year the Brontë literary-industrial complex celebrates the bicentennial of Charlotte’s birth, and British and American publishers have been especially busy. In the U.S., there is a new Charlotte Brontë biography by Claire Harman; a Brontë-themed literary detective novel; a novelistic riff on Jane Eyre whose heroine is a serial killer; a collection of short stories inspired by that novel’s famous last line, “Reader, I married him”; and a fan-fiction-style “autobiography” of Nelly Dean, the servant-narrator of Wuthering Heights. Last year’s highlights included a young-adult novelization of Emily’s adolescence and a book of insightful essays called The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, which uses items belonging to Charlotte, Emily, and Anne …

It’s not often that Florence Marryat makes the national press, so this has been an exciting week. An unpublished letter from 1860 has emerged in which Charles Dickens berates Marryat for requesting advice from him. She offered a short story for inclusion in his journal All the Year Round, hoping that he would also give her a critique. Of course, it’s perfectly usual for authors to solicit feedback from editors, and Dickens was actually a close friend of her father, fellow novelist Captain Frederick Marryat. Poor Florence must’ve been rather miffed to receive a three-page snotgram in response.